A Country of Vast Designs by Robert W. Merry James K. Polk, the Mexican War and the Conquest of the American Continent

ROBERT MERRY’S BRILLIANT AND HIGHLY ACCLAIMED HISTORY OF A CRUCIAL EPOCH IN U.S. HISTORY.

In a one-term presidency, James K. Polk completed the story of America’s Manifest Destiny—extending its territory across the continent by threatening England with war and manufacturing a controversial and unpopular two-year war with Mexico.

Robert Merry is the editor of The National Interest. He has been a Washington correspondent for the Wall Street Journal and the Executive Editor of the Congressional Quarterly. He has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Weekly Standard, The National Review, The American Spectator, and The National Interest. He has appeared in Meet the Press, Face the Nation, Newsmakers, and many other programs. He lives in McLean, Virginia.

Unrated Critic Reviews for A Country of Vast Designs

Kirkus Reviews

Merry (Sands of Empire: Missionary Zeal, American Foreign Policy, and the Hazards of Global Ambition, 2005, etc.) skillfully places Polk within the era’s political firmament, and he ably assesses his complex character and chronicles his contentious relations with a variety of players, especially ...

The New York Times

(Polk was also renowned as an impressive speaker and campaigner despite his ordinary, 5-foot-8-inch frame: hence the nickname Napoleon of the Stump.) Polk was, Merry writes, “in many ways a smaller-than-life figure, but he harbored larger-than-life ambitions.” He combined those ambitions with an ...

Open Letters Monthly

Yet Polk was responsible for creating a continental nation, roughly doubling the size of the United States by adding 1.2 million square miles of territory (that would become the states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, California, Nevada, Utah, most of Arizona, and parts of New Mexico, Colorado, Mont...